Just Got Out of Prison. Now What? | Hacker News Reader

Just Got Out of Prison. Now What?

nytimes.com

Do California's parole rules allow parolees to associate with ex-felons? When I was released (federal prison, not California), my conditions of supervised release prohibited me from associating with other ex-felons. This effectively makes illegal any kind of "support group" for newly-released people. Now that I'm way past my supervised release, I'm allowed to hang around a recently-released friend (14 years after my release), but he isn't allowed to hang around me because of the same rules. Weird system, it is.

I think the rules apply to casual association to prevent former parolees from going back to the same social circles.

I'm pretty sure the rules don't apply to official, especially court-ordered, encounters. Many parolees are required to go to AA or anger management classes, and those are full of other people in the same predicament. The same applies to halfway housing.

I imagine that since this ride was under the control of an official non-profit, the contact was approved.

I'm not a fan of the rules limiting free association and I think it should be considered a violation of civil liberties. I don't know if it's ever been challenged in the courts.

Re some condition of parole being a violation of civil liberties, how would it be different than prison being a violation of civil liberties?

I'm not snarking, I'm asking what the difference would be.

IANAL, but if parole is just a way to more cheaply supervise someone still serving their time it seems like the same thing... Once parole is over though...well then it would be because you've finished your sentence.

It isn't as bad after parole, but it's still there. For example, I have lost my 2nd amendment rights forever, even though I completed the sentence ~13 years ago.

I never noticed the asterisk on the constitution that said "*unless we deem that you are a criminal".

I'm surprised the NRA has never raised this issue.

My understanding is that, because the convict could choose to finish his or her sentence instead, parole is given extremely wide latitude in terms of the conditions that can be set. That does set up other, stupid, situations where convicts who haven't been paroled and hence served their full sentences are given zero supervision after release because you can't force them.

If you wish to be appalled, read this [1] discussing parole boards. For the same rationale as above, they are given incredibly wide latitude with very little review, and often no disclosure, behind their decisions.

[1] https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/07/10/life-without-p...

This. Originally, at least, parole was viewed as a reduction in your sentence for keeping your nose clean while you were in prison. They let you out of jail, but technically your sentence isn't up yet. So legally they can pretty much do anything they could do while you were in.

It's just a bad rule. Two felons get out of prison and want to start a landscaping company. A old truck, a few tools, and a craigslist ad; you have the beginnings of a company. The felons were probally friends in prison, and trust eachother? Give these two felons a chance?

I understand the rule if the felon belonged to a gang Before being incarcerated. Keep the stipulation. The rest of the guys/girls should be allowed to associate with other ex-felons.

Sometimes, those of us who are not in denial, are one mistake, at one wild/desperate period in our lives of racking up a felony? Why make it so difficult for ex-felons to succed after being let lose? I just don't get it. No wonder some of these guys want to go back to prison--institutionalized--they term it? No, they just don't want to die on the streets of homelessness! I had a 65 year old ex-felon as a friend for years. His felon was 45 years ago. He had a slight disability(enough to notice), and for years he collected disability. Some young doctor decided to not renew his disability claim. He told me, "I will commit a nonviolent crime in order to keep a roof over my head!". I talked him out of it, and we got a lawyer to reaffirm his disability claim.

(Ironic side story. I came home today with a note on my door from the U.S. Office of personnel management federal investigation service. My neighbor is applying for a security clearance? This neighbor is the last person I would trust with anything--let alone a security clearance. No he's not a felon, but should be--he's white, and got lucky in his shady business dealings. Will I talk to a dective--No--I just don't care anymore. The felons, I have known, I trust--crazy--huh?

> Hammock was sent away in 1994, at a time when stiff sentencing reforms around the country were piling more people into prison for longer amounts of time. These included California’s ‘‘three-strikes law,’’ which took effect just months before Hammock was arrested. The law imposed life sentences for almost any crime if the offender had two previous ‘‘serious’’ or ‘‘violent’’ convictions. (The definitions of ‘‘serious’’ and ‘‘violent’’ in California’s penal code are broad; attempting to steal a bicycle from someone’s garage is ‘‘serious.’’)

One thing the article doesn't mention is that California's three strikes law was not the result of Corrections Corporation of America donating a bunch of money to influential state senators. It was voted-in based on public referendum with 71% support. So was Washington's, with even more public support.

You can't get 70%+ of Americans to agree on anything, except apparently putting people in prison for life for potentially non-violent felonies.

Yeah, but maybe it was the appeal to baseball that sealed it.

This is what always amazed me about this law, even when it passed when I was a kid. It was based on what...a sport? Was there any evidence at the time that this was even effective?

That seems like an uncharitable interpretation of the rationale behind these laws. One could argue -- completely divorced from sports analogies -- that the third time someone commits a serious crime they are exhibiting a pattern of lawless, antisocial behavior and not merely one-off offenses. (I still don't believe there's much evidence that this approach serves as a deterrent, and it certainly doesn't help rehabilitation to lump many different crimes together -- including non-violent ones like bicycle theft.)

No. As a Californian, it was the appeal of getting all those people off the street and into a warehouse somewhere out in the Desert or on the Coast. Crime in the 90's was pretty bad out here and many people, including myself, had no problems with taking people who would knock you over the head for a dollar and sticking them somewhere until age or common sense had taught them otherwise.

Now, not teaching people about the outside world after they have been in jail for 20 years is pretty dumb. These people who have been locked for a while need mentor and class on how the outside world works.

But, like, why "three strikes you're out" and not this:

  totalSentence = firstTimeOffenderSentence * (1 + numberOfPriors)

That's a bad idea. A roughly Pareto law (80/20) applies to criminals. The majority of all murders are done by a small group. Meanwhile, the majority of all murderers never commit another crime. Jail sentences should be relatively light for the 80 and fairly severe for the 20. That means first-time offenders should get minimal sentences, but repeat offenders should get long prison terms.

You're saying a few things: 1) light sentences for 80, and heavy sentences for 20; 2) light sentences for first-timers, and heavy sentences for repeat offenders; 3) more than half of the 20 are first-timers. Per 3, at least 11/20 exist that should get a heavy sentence under 1 and a light sentence under 2, which is a contradiction.

If we just forget about the murder thing, why not "two strikes you're out" then? Because baseball?

The 80% and the first timers are mostly the same group, since the 80% only commit one crime during their life. Therefore, when you deal with a first-time, chances are good that you are dealing with someone who will only ever commit one crime. Therefore a lighter than average sentence is justified. Likewise, the 20% and the repeat-offenders are mostly the same people, so you can treat them as one group. So if you are dealing with someone who has committed a second or third crime, you can assume they are in the 20% who commit most crimes. And therefore you should apply severe penalties.

I don't know where you got "more than half of the 20 are first-timers." That is simply impossible: by definition, no one is in the 20% if they are a first-timer.

You can read more about the Pareto Principle here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

From Wikipedia:

"The Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes."

This has been proven to apply to crime. Roughly 80% of crimes are committed by 20% of the people who break the law.

You needed to claim something like "the vast majority of murderers have non-murder priors" in addition to "the majority of all murderers never commit another crime". Otherwise, based on what you wrote, it is unclear whether you believe someone whose first conviction is murder should get a short or long sentence.

This is nonsense:

"You needed to claim something like "the vast majority of murderers have non-murder priors""

I am making a claim about whether someone should get a relatively light sentence for the given crime, versus whether someone should get a severe sentence for the given crime. I am not making any claims about which specific sentence applies to which specific crime. My claim applies to all categories of crime, from jaywalking to murder.

Your point about murder is irrelevant to the point I was making. However, I have noticed that when I mention "murder" people assume I must mean first degree murder, even though less than 20% of all murders are first degree. What's much more common is 3rd degree murder, such as drunk driving, or driving while sleepy, or over confidence in one's ability to control a camp fire at a camp grounds, or failure to put out a cigarette properly, or any of the hundreds of other small accidents that people can do that then leads to someone else's death, and which an aggressive district attorney will treat as 3rd degree murder.

Hey man, I dunno, two other commenters besides me failed to understand your original logic. I just tried to explain what was unclear about it.

> A roughly Pareto law (80/20) applies to criminals.

Okay, criminals can be divided into groups 80 and 20.

> The majority of all murders are done by a small group.

Presumably, since it's the next sentence, the murders are done by group 20.

> Meanwhile, the majority of all murderers never commit another crime.

[^] The majority of group 20 commits only one offense. (Unless of course you state that murderers have a non-murder prior, which was the clarification you refuted.)

> Jail sentences should be relatively light for the 80 and fairly severe for the 20.

[+] The non-murderers in 80 should get light sentences and murderers in 20 should get severe sentences.

> That means first-time offenders should get minimal sentences, but repeat offenders should get long prison terms.

Because of the statement marked [^], the majority of murderers should get minimal sentences, which conflicts with the statement marked [+], unless you state that all murderers have a non-murder prior.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Light sentences for murderers? I couldn't support that.

Everyone gets one free murder.

Didn't crime rates famously fall in the 1990s?

Don't bring facts into this!

Per capita murder rates in the US peaked at 9.8 (per 100k) in 1991 and we still close to that peak at 9.5 when CA passed their three strikes law in 1993.

Edit: actually 1991 was a local maxima. It was exceeded by a bit in the early 80s. Still though these laws were definitely passed when crime was quite high.

It looks like crime rates rose- even sharply- in the first part of the decade, then fell (if this source can be believed).

http://www.data360.org/graph_group.aspx?Graph_Group_Id=154

Also, at the national level, the Three Strikes came around when most of America was in the middle of a lot of drug-related violence. So the Three Strikes rule, plus the War on Drugs, plus the Kingpin laws were used with extreme prejudice to try and curtail the panic.

Granted, now we have the benefit of hindsight and statistics to see how effective those have been. Getting rid of several heads of crime rings? Exceptionally well. Just watch Gangsters: America's Most Evil from A&E. Every single person came from that era. How well has it worked on drugs in general or crime rates? That's much more debatable.

EDIT: typo

Criminals getting a raw deal is hard to sell to an electorate who actually work for a living. The best way to sell it is that non-criminals can reduce their tax burden.

Must be nice to leave in such a happy black and white world :-\

While his tone is too harsh the underlying idea is the problem with crime reform.

"Those other guys aren't my problem" is a general consensus and "those other guys who got through our great court system and were found guilty" is a huge barrier to overcome for most people, even though it is a bogus sentiment for a ton of reasons.

And to be fair, a lot of research was showing that repeat offenders were a problem for society, it has been shown that the harshness of the prison system and the after effects are why, but if you don't know that link then saying "well they keep doing it so lets take care of the problem" while simultaneously discouraging repeat offense makes sense. Again underlying those things is falsehoods and three-strikes is a terrible idea, but it doesn't take much thought to see why it became so popular.

Except that most people will be happy to pay the extra taxes if it makes the streets safer.

I think the best way to get serious reform is to point out the relationship between crime and punishment has gotten a bit too loose, and that it's a matter of basic justice to expect the punishment to fit the crime.

Sure, but who convinced 71% of Californians that this approach was a good idea?

Nobody needed to convince Californians. The early 90s were the era of the crack wars, where it seemed like every other day you'd read about some kid taking a stray bullet because a drug dealer was trying to take out a rival by spraying his house with gunfire.

Why were there crack wars and their accompanying violence?

(Just playing a little root-cause-analysis here.)

Crack was new and popular and very lucrative. Dealers were staking out territory. If there's more to it than that I'm not aware.

Why was crack new and popular?

I'm not sure what you're getting at. It was new because it was new. It was popular for the same reason any drug is popular. You're not gonna go Crazy Maxine on me, are you?

Who did convince them? In 1994, the for-profit prison industry was tiny. CCR cleared just a few million in profits each year: http://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/05/business/corrections-corp-....

In 1994, the industry was tiny, and California voted-in a draconian three strikes law by a 71% margin. In 2012, the industry was booming, with CCA clearing hundreds of millions a year in revenue, and Californians vote to pare back their three law with a similar 69% margin.

To me, your implied conclusion is totally divorced from reality. Rather, the obvious conclusion is that Californians circa 2012 simply came from a less heartless and bloodthirsty generation than Californians circa 1994.

I'm not a sociologist nor a criminologist, but I do drink with them. There are a lot of factors:

1 - there really was (an almost certainly environmental lead-triggered) crime wave that is finally mostly over. Also mix in crack and other drugs.

2 - there was the advent of 24x7 tv news, and when you need something to fill that air time, scary black man randomly killing white people suits perfectly. Even though that is a tiny minority of murders.

3 - people don't understand type 1 and type 2 error: every time a person is set free, some tiny fraction will recidivate (baring incarceration until death.) Mix this in with #2, and you see how sentences increase monotonously.

4 - republicans discover racism motivates voters. See, eg, the Willie Horton commercials [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Horton

Wow! Calling out the fact a convicted felon shouldn't have been let out to murder again is racism?

Thanks for perfectly demonstrating #3!

And yes, the Willie Horton commercials as run by Lee Atwater were indeed racist.

Lee Atwater's famous quote is

   You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t 
   say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced 
   busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.

Guess who was running George HW Bush' campaign?

   Republicans picked up the Horton issue after Dukakis clinched the 
   nomination. In June 1988, Republican candidate George H.W. Bush seized on 
   the Horton case, bringing it up repeatedly in campaign speeches. Bush's 
   campaign manager, Lee Atwater, said "By the time we're finished, they're 
   going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis' running mate." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Horton

But Atwater wasn't talking about himself or Bush, was he? This is just your typical moral preening, where he gets to say how much better he is than some other (unnamed) guy, which is something you see from Democrats on a regular basis. This is what he says later in the same interview:

"But Reagan did not have to do a southern strategy for two reasons. Number one, race was not a dominant issue. And number two, the mainstream issues in this campaign had been, quote, southern issues since way back in the sixties. So Reagan goes out and campaigns on the issues of economics and of national defense. The whole campaign was devoid of any kind of racism, any kind of reference. And I'll tell you another thing you all need to think about, that even surprised me, is the lack of interest, really, the lack of knowledge right now in the South among white voters about the Voting Rights Act."

The problem Democrats have when discussing crime is they don't realize people on the other side don't see life through a racial prism, so to us Willie Horton was about crime and not about race.

Oh, Atwater may well have claimed he didn't do the same thing. That's contra basically all available evidence, even as supplied in the quote -- you move on to economics. What did Reagan move on to -- economics.

viz your (implied) claim the Willie Horton ad wasn't racist, well, people on the other side don't see life through a racial prism because they're either racist themselves or sufficiently privileged they can ignore it. See the confederate flag debates. In reality, there's abundant evidence everywhere you look. For one of many examples, see the weird way black people randomly just somehow up and die in police custody. Or Nate Silver:

   “If you’re a white person your chance of being murdered every year is 2.5 
   out of 10,000," he told Halper. "If you’re a black person it’s 19.4, so 
   almost eight times higher." [1 for quote, 2 for data]

[1] http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/nate-silver-black-amer...

[2] http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/black-americans-are-kille...

>That's contra basically all available evidence, even as supplied in the quote -- you move on to economics.

Not the way I read it at all. He's just preening.

>viz your (implied) claim the Willie Horton ad wasn't racist, well, people on the other side don't see life through a racial prism because they're either racist themselves or sufficiently privileged they can ignore it.

Ah, yes, the old infinitely malleable "sufficiently privileged". Let me provide another possibility: People on the other side don't see things through a racial prism because they treat other people as individuals, and it's just not natural for us to treat people as part of a different, larger organism.

I'm not sure why you threw in the Nate Silver quote, or why you didn't bother to go to the data instead of relying on someone to tldr it for you.

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/...

The fact is black guys get murdered by other black guys. What does this have to do with the discussion? If the makers of the Willie Horton ads were really playing the race angle they would have found someone who murdered a black guy.

Here is the quote with more context:

> Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

> Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

He's talking about the 1980 campaign run by the Republicans here, and it absolutely about appealing to racist voters, and getting them to vote for you, without appearing racist yourself. But part of it is pledges to support policies that will disproportionately affect blacks rather than whites, and how to code the rhetoric in such a way that the message will get across without being obvious enough to create a scandal. That's what he means when he says "the whole campaign was devoid of any kind of racism, any kind of reference" - the emphasis there is on reference.

You might think you don't see life through a racial prism, but the Republican party of the eighties most definitely did, and they exploited it.

I read the entire exchange. The other quote is far more definitive.

>You might think you don't see life through a racial prism, but the Republican party of the eighties most definitely did, and they exploited it.

No they didn't. For Republicans Willie Horton was a story about a guy who killed someone on a weekend furlough. Only for Democrats was it about a black guy who killed someone on a weekend furlough.

> No they didn't. For Republicans Willie Horton was a story about a guy who killed someone on a weekend furlough. Only for Democrats was it about a black guy who killed someone on a weekend furlough.

You act as though it could have only been a racial issue if the Republicans had explicitly made it so, which is not how it works, and that by calling them out on it, Democrats made it into a racial issue, which is laughably disingenuous. Considering the obsession that Lee Atwater had with racial politics, and in light of the fact that he was a big part of how the Republicans ran campaigns in the 80s (not to mention that you still see echoes of those strategies even today), I guess you are certainly, totally, and kind of embarrassingly wrong, actually.

>You act as though it could have only been a racial issue if the Republicans had explicitly made it so, which is not how it works, and that by calling them out on it, Democrats made it into a racial issue, which is laughably disingenuous.

Rather than laughably disingenuous, that's exactly the case, though it's pretty silly to characterize cynical demagoguery as "calling them out".

Maybe you should read the entire thread. The only way you could hold this position is to ignore the evidence to the contrary and rely entirely on your Democrat secret racial code word decoder ring. You know only Democrats have those, right?

Well only Democrats are supposed to have them. They are acquired easily enough, though. Let me know when you get yours before we continue this utterly fruitless conversation any further.

The fact that someone could use Willie Horton to stoke racism or political gain doesn't change the story.

The fact remains that Dukakis supported a program that caused a woman to be raped. Shouldn't he have to defend his decisions?

> every time a person is set free, some tiny fraction will recidivate

In the US the recidivism rate is over 60%. That's a gigantic fraction.

Amongst those convicted of homicide, it is nowhere near that. Estimates place it at 20-30%, and of those, the highest proportion is for those convicted of homicide during a felony while others such as those who where convicted of DV-related homicide recidivate at closer to 10% (which makes a certain macabre sense.)

see eg http://nj.gov/corrections/pdf/REU/Recidivism_Among_Homicide_...

I meant the phrase "tiny fraction" in light of the discussion of T1 and T2 errors: no matter what rule is made, unless you incarcerate all felons until death, some fraction will recidivate. How to correctly weigh type 1 errors is difficult.

I wasn't implying anything, especially not CCR's involvement.

(I'm a fan of "five whys" analysis.)

It was the Polly Klaas murder that boosted support for Three Strikes. In '93, a felon named Richard Allan Davis interrupted a slumber party and kidnapped/killed a 13 year old. After that, her father led the campaign for Three Strikes.

> In the wake of the murder, politicians in California and other U.S. states supported three strikes laws, and California's Three Strikes act was signed into law on March 8, 1994.[9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Polly_Klaas

I think there are definitely big players involved in the coordination of narrative. I think in a world where people live far apart and don't visit the same websites or watch the same shows, it's hard to coordinate action or belief. I think it takes money and organization.

I think Proposition 8 of California is another example; there was a lot of money involved from big players. It's not necessarily a corporation, but I wouldn't say these things are exactly grassroots.

Malcolm Gladwell's excellent 2006 New Yorker article "Million Dollar Murray" directly addresses some of the grumbling in the comments below... it's easy for people who've followed the law to resent spending money on people who've broken the law, but it would be more efficient to spend a little money on decreasing recidivism and save a lot on incarceration. Gladwell sums it up nicely with an example from Denver's homelessness problems:

"That is what is so perplexing about power-law homeless policy. From an economic perspective the approach makes perfect sense. But from a moral perspective it doesn’t seem fair. Thousands of people in the Denver area no doubt live day to day, work two or three jobs, and are eminently deserving of a helping hand—and no one offers them the key to a new apartment. Yet that’s just what the guy screaming obscenities and swigging Dr. Tich gets. When the welfare mom’s time on public assistance runs out, we cut her off. Yet when the homeless man trashes his apartment we give him another. Social benefits are supposed to have some kind of moral justification. We give them to widows and disabled veterans and poor mothers with small children. Giving the homeless guy passed out on the sidewalk an apartment has a different rationale. It’s simply about efficiency."

http://gladwell.com/million-dollar-murray/

EDIT: Changed "much of the grumbling" to "some"

Focusing on societal efficiency at the expense of other things seems like a good short-term solution, but a lousy long-term one.

Please demonstrate why this is lousy?

Now apply to the Greek debt case. The Austerians are applying a value-ethics model. The proponents of debt restructuring/condonation are applying a consequentialist model.

The Austerians' blindness to consequences will provoke a Greek exit from the Euro, and is turning many europeists in many other countries (me included) into euroskeptics.

Same with many other rifts between ideology and evidence in policy. Abstinence-based sex education comes to mind. There are probably many others.

As your comment is marked 1 hour old, I see little grumbling about spending money on people who've broken the law (conversely, there are several comments speaking to the rationality of attempting to rehabilitate people who will be released).

I don't think anyone likes spending money on people who've broken the law. But given that the options are 1. Incarcerate and spend more or 2. provide assistance and spend less, it doesn't look like much of a choice.. unless someone can think of a better solution

I was just pushing back on the thread summary that was offered. I think it is wrong, and it's a pet peeve of mine when people offer up a summary that is more convenient to their argument than it is accurate.

Didn't mean to put this forward as a "summary" of the thread, just wanted to note the moral argument going on in some of the comments -- the injustice that people who follow the laws pay to rehabilitate those who break the laws against them, versus the argument that it's far cheaper to rehabilitate people who break laws than to continually incarcerate people who remain unrehabilitated -- and point to a similar argument in another contentious public policy issue.

I've changed "much" to "some" to weaken my claim re: how much disagreement about that is going on this thread. There is certainly some: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9899924

Not sure why my comment is being downvoted... this comment and its children were most of what I was referring to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9899924

As many other problems for which we have half baked solutions, we don't take a systems approach to the issue. We simply want to punish and forget. It's dollars cheaper, but socially expensive.

We could try more intervention, prevention, and while in, preparation to exit and productivity the whole time. We'd have fewer people in, those who went in would come out more productive and ready.

Of course some people are just "bad" incurable, but that number should be far reduced. Most cons should not be treated as pariahs indefinitely, again, with some exceptions. But we should make a good effort to rehabilitate, perhaps, in addition to punishment. Punishment being paramount to victims but rehabilitation being paramount to society.

> It's dollars cheaper

It's only dollars cheaper in the short term, and even then only if one takes a very narrow view of the issue(s).

Helping people reintegrate into society can cut recidivism rates, as exemplified by Michigan's Prisoner Re-entry Program [0], which lowered the recidivism rate from 43.5% to 29% [1] and shrunk the state's prison population by 12% [2]. "If states could reduce their recidivism rates by just 10 percent, they could save more than $635 million combined in one year alone in averted prison costs." [2]

Of course these programs cost money... but the Michigan program receives $12-20 million of funding per year, and has saved the state "hundreds of millions of dollars." [3]

And there would also be savings in the areas of law enforcement, property damage, etc...

[0] http://www.bhpi.org/?id=54&sid=1

[1] http://michiganradio.org/term/michigan-prisoner-re-entry-pro...

[2] http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/00...

[3] http://michiganradio.org/post/snyder-administration-cut-prog...

It would be nice if we could take the emotion out of what to do. My thought is we need to separate prisoners into two categories: 1. Those who will never be released. 2. Those that will be released one day.

For the first category it does not matter what you do, but for the second we should be putting every effort into making sure they will be released a better person. Punish the first group as much as your morals think is appropriate, but punishing the second is counterproductive.

I find these articles interesting but get disturbed when the titles typically point the finger at me but, I have never been arrested, or in prison, and know no one who has ever been in such a situation in my 63 years of living.

I am not in a closet or a holy roller either; nor are any of my friends or family. I live in a mid-sized city and grew up middle-class, became poor when out on my own, and am now well off.

I would never put myself in such a situation to shame myself or my family or harm others. But I was brought up that way.

Well it is not politically correct to mention personal responsibility in any fashion, which is actually the heart of the problem.

Personality grows out of the environment you are in. Teaching personal responsibility to someone who is on the street associating with gangs can be a lost cause.

I think prison can serve to change someones environment to such levels that they are willing to change themselves. Maybe not 30 years of prison though.

Parents have a lot to do with outcomes but that cannot be legislated.

Like the personal responsibility not to shoot a guy with his hands out?

Or the personal responsibility not to continually push for the hardest sentences you can because it'll help your career?

Or the personal responsibility to recognize that what consenting adults put into their own bodies in privacy isn't something you should have a say in?

One of those?

I suppose if you made heroin and coke legal you would end quite a few occupations, but I doubt they would join the daily grind.

Your first line references a bald-faced lie so your stance is in jeopardy.

http://news.yahoo.com/video-released-shows-police-killing-un...

I dunno...sure seems true to me.

It's not about political correctness. It's just useless to bring up personal responsibility when discussing policy. Personal responsibility comes down to, "don't do that. But some people will not follow that command. What do you do with them? Repeating "don't do that" accomplishes nothing.

What do you do with them? Isn't that the entire purpose of the justice system?

I don't think it's unreasonable for society to expect people not to commit crimes and punish them when they do.

Yes, of course that's the entire purpose of the justice system. And we're talking about the justice system, and different ways it might be adjusted to achieve better outcomes. And then along come the people I replied to talking about "personal responsibility" which is completely useless to bring up in context.

Nobody cares about your "personal responsibility" concern trolling. At the end of the day, you either simply want to punish, or you're actually interested in figuring out the problem.

Thanks for pointing out the linkbait "you" in the title. We missed that one.

It's a pet peeve of ours, too, when titles abuse "you". Headline writers use this trope because it grabs attention, which is their job; and it's our job to undo their grating gimmicks. In the present case, that's as simple as deleting the bogus "you".

The problem with that attitude is in this day and age you can't make your way through life without committing felonies. The federal legal code is so long and convoluted not even the lawyers understand it outside their own narrow specialties.

Of course everyone knows it's illegal to rape or murder, but how many people know what "structuring" is? There are people sitting in federal prison for doing things normal people don't realize are crimes.

get arrested, go back to prison

Great article.

admittedly didn't read the article, but assuming something like this might answer the question posed in the headline; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRZ2Sh5-XuM

Personally I'm all for harsh sentences for violent offenders, but once your sentence is up (for any crime) that should be the end of it. You should have all the rights non-incarcerated people have - free association, voting, gun ownership.

On the jobs side I have no idea what the right thing to do is. On one hand if people with criminal records can't get jobs you're pretty much forcing them to return to a life of crime. But on the other hand... if I'm hiring people I'll only hire a guy with a serious criminal record if I can't find anyone else. That's just self preservation.

> Personally I'm all for harsh sentences for violent offenders

Why? There's no clear evidence that particularly harsh sentences actually reduce recidivism.

I don't really care if it reduces recidivism or not. If you commit a violent crime you deserve to be in jail.

What it does do is prevent the violent offenders from committing crimes against the citizenry for the duration of the sentence.

Is there any evidence that one violent act means that a person will likely commit more?

I would have a hard time believing that isn't the case, but I'm open to any evidence you have.

Wouldn't the burden of proof be on those asserting that someone who commits one violent crime needs to be put away so they won't commit more?

Nope. You're staking out a position that's counter-intuitive, so you're the one who has to get the data ball rolling.

The majority of people are incarcerated for non violent offences, if you give lesser sentences to those people and not give them a criminal record it would solve most of your issues.

Yeah, I think violence is a pretty clear dividing line. I'm not particularly interested in trying to eradicate petty crime by putting hookers, pot dealers, and scam artists away for long periods of time. Even if it worked (and it doesn't) it wouldn't be just.

Previous episode of violence is a reasonable predictor of future violent behaviour.

I'm not sure that gun ownership for violent people is a good idea.

I'm not sure it is either, but as far as I'm concerned when a sentence is over it's over, and as a society we ought to give ex-cons a chance to prove they can become upstanding citizens.

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